


you're not right but you're not wrong (we're just singing from a different song)

by irnan



Series: on a thin chain of moments and something like faith [2]
Category: Batgirl (Comics), Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics)
Genre: Bat Family, Family, Fluff and Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-23
Updated: 2013-08-23
Packaged: 2017-12-24 10:46:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/939061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irnan/pseuds/irnan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>First you gotta do the truffle shuffle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you're not right but you're not wrong (we're just singing from a different song)

**Author's Note:**

> You don't know how tempted I was to make the summary "it's a stiff!!" in capslock. Because of how Jason died that one time!!! ahahaha. 
> 
> So, uh, it's basically a retread of "war is never cheap dear", except with added boy!Robins. THIS IS A LEGITIMATE PREMISE FOR A FIC. Title from James Skelly and the Intenders.
> 
> Honestly I have no idea if Dick has ever actually laid eyes on Granny Goodness.

**(i – cass and tim)**

It was seven-thirty on a Sunday morning when Tim Drake stumbled into the kitchen of his apartment and found his older brother sprawled in a chair with his boots scuffing up the kitchen table and a smug look on his face.

Tim took a moment to reflect on the irony of the fact that based on that behaviour alone you wouldn’t be able to tell if he was referring to Jason Todd or Dick Grayson.

“They let you out early for good behaviour?” he grumped.

“Oh, you know,” said Jason. “I fluttered my eyelashes at a couple people. You look wrecked, Replacement, did Superboy finally manage to get into your knickers last night? I mean, the _stamina_ that kid must have…”

“I kind of want to make some remark about your decades-long crush on Donna Troy but I figure Wonder Woman would hunt me down,” said Tim.

“I can’t help but notice that you haven’t actually denied the accusation,” Jason said cheerfully.

Tim said blandly, “You didn’t accuse me of anything,” and fixed himself a bowl of cereal while Jason was rolling his eyes. Other people might call that grossly dangerous, but Tim considered himself something of an expert on Jason Todd’s here-to-pick-a-fight expressions, and he wasn’t wearing one. In fact he looked almost… comfortable… happy to be here.

Twist of a twelve year old’s hope in his chest, more resilient than Tim liked to admit. He stomped on it.

“You gonna offer me coffee?” asked Jason.

Tim looked at the coffee machine, three feet away from and slightly behind Jason’s right hand; then he looked at Jason again; then back at the coffee machine.

“I’m being polite.”

“You’ve already broken in,” said Tim.

“Not true,” said Jason, still sounding obscenely cheerful. In fact, it was beginning to get more frightening than his here-to-pick-a-fight expression. “I had a key.”

Tim snorted into his cornflakes.

“I mighta known you’d eat cornflakes,” Jason added. “ _Sugarless_ cornflakes, oh my God, the actual most boring breakfast food ever known to man, unless you count oatmeal which I don’t, cause oatmeal is hot and filling and does you good, and that is just processed, boring crap.”

Tim stared at him.

“At least the sugared stuff is processed, interesting crap.”

“OK,” said Tim. “Lemme just finish this. Then we’ll run the blood tests and I’ll give you the antidote to whatever Ivy dosed you with.”

And then Jason did something he’d never done in Tim’s presence before: he started to laugh.

Tim dropped his spoon into the cereal bowl. “Jay,” he said, knowing he was taking his life into his hands by doing so. “Jay, you’re really freaking me out.”

“Oh, relax,” said Jason. “I’m not even here to see _you_.”

And how sick was it that hearing that made Tim’s stomach drop in disappointment, just for an instant? He picked his spoon up again and took another mouthful. “So you want Cass?”

She’d told him about that conversation on Jason’s birthday. It had made Tim want to – well, honestly, he still didn’t know. Laugh at both of them, maybe, for thinking that anything as human and vulnerable as empathy might touch the Red Hood.

Then again, Jason wasn’t the one who hid his hurts away and pretended they were scarred over almost before they’d stopped bleeding. He sharpened his pain to a razorblade and sliced you open with it, which was a thing neither Tim nor Dick had ever quite managed to learn from Bruce.

“Is she in?”

Tim sighed. Then he hauled himself to his feet and slouched to the corridor.

“CAAAAAAASS!”

Distantly, a door slammed. Behind him, Jason started laughing again.

“WHAAAAAAT!”

“JASON’S HERE TO SEE YOU!”

Silence for a moment; then the sound of Cass running down the stairs. Tim slouched back to his cereal bowl and poked at it, ostentatiously suspicious.

“I wouldn’t do that!” said Jason, mock-indignant.

“Uh huh.”

“Not while Cass is in the house, anyway.”

“What!” said Cass, bounding into the kitchen. She was wearing Robin pyjamas, hair scraped back into a messy bun.

“OK, no,” said Jason, pointing at the pyjamas. Tim glanced at Cass: she was watching Jason, but whatever she saw in that comfortable sprawl he had going on was clearly reassuring her.

“Steph,” Cass explained. “I like them.” She gave them both a twirl, grinning.

Jason shook his head, disgusted. Tim said, “You should’ve seen Dick’s face.”

“He probably thinks he should get royalties.”

“That’s Damian,” said Cass. Both her brothers rolled their eyes. She jumped up to sit cross-legged on the countertop and said to Jason, more seriously, “S’up?”

“Ah,” said Jason. “Well. You picked up on that murder over at Endsbury Park?”

“Yep,” Tim and Cass said simultaneously.

“Right. It’s not the only one.”

Tim stilled. “Serial?”

“Looks like it. I have three other missing girls, two of whom turned up dead on the mainland last week.”

“… aaaaaaaand?” said Tim.

Jason pulled his cell out of his jacket pocket and showed it to Cass. “Two second-generation Chinese-American immigrants and one girl whose family is from North Korea.”

“You want me to play bait,” said Cass.

He grinned. “You up for it?”

She shrugged and grinned back. It was not what Tim would’ve called a reassuring expression.

“What kind of bait?” he asked suspiciously. Cass was good at a lot of things, but acting wasn’t always among them. She’d learnt to lie with words, but not with her body.

“The kind that stands around looking harmless and waits for a douchebag serial killer to hit on it, whereupon –“

Cass interrupted by pointing a finger in his face. “No killing,” she said.

“-I intend to hit him with something blunt and heavy and non-lethal,” Jason finished.

Cass crossed her arms and glared at him.

Jason shook his head. He looked as if he meant it; but then, he’d been unusually… genuine… from the second Tim had come into the kitchen. Tim didn’t trust it.

There was a lot Tim didn’t trust, wasn’t there? Tam had been right: he’d become a thoroughly unpleasant mistrustful douchebag.

Maybe… maybe Jason was really trying.

Maybe pigs would fly.

He sighed.

“Just so we’re clear,” he said, “I refuse to be the schmuck who explains things to Bruce when it all goes sideways.”

Jason assumed a saintly look. “Oh ye of little faith,” he said.

Cass _giggled_.

“I think I’m just gonna go back to bed,” said Tim.

And he did.

 

 

**(ii – steph and damian)**

They’d trashed the warehouse district equivalent of three city blocks by the time Jason caught up with them, and Steph was hanging upside down over a substantial drop to the basement levels of the fifth warehouse, torn between wishing the line around her ankle wasn’t killing the circulation to her foot and profoundly grateful that it was, you know, stopping her from falling to a messy and undignified death.

Gravity, man. It was the _worst_.

The Red Hood sauntered out onto the rafter she was hanging from and said, “Nice boots.”

Steph sighed. “Of all the inane remarks you could find to make,” she said, and bit back a shout when Jason started hauling her up; the movement was jolting her poor bruised ribs. Still, at least she wasn’t having to climb back up herself. That was a nice change.

“You’re welcome,” he said, wrapping leather-gloved fingers around her outstretched hand and helping her up. Steph straddled the rafter to unwind the line from her ankle; Jason squatted in front of her and made no move to help. Tim would’ve dived right in and gotten his hands tangled up in it.

She rubbed at her ankle in relief when the line fell away. “Thanks,” she said.

“Nice night for it,” he said, hollow voice noticeably amused.

“Take my advice,” she said. “Never patrol with Robin when there’s a chance you might run into Killer Croc.”

“Killer Croc.”

“I understand it’s a matter of personal enmity,” said Steph.

“Seriously?”

“Hoo yeah. Don’t ask me why, I tried prying it out of him and he had conniptions.”

Jason seemed to be thinking that over. “Huh,” he said. “Bet big brother knows.”

“He’s Batman,” said Steph. “He knows all. It’s in the job description. They made him sign a contract. _In blood_.”

She was fairly sure that Jason was rolling his eyes under that helmet. “I’ll take your word for it.”

“Uh huh,” said Steph.

Wow, awkward.

Well, how _did_ you hold a conversation with a formerly-dead dude you’d been compared to so often it made your head spin who’d just saved you from the clutches of gravity? Steph was good at running her mouth off, but Jason had a way of making her speechless.

She was willing to accept the hypothesis that a certain percentage of it was physical attraction, but mostly it was just that he was _Jason_ , and he was _here_ , and he seemed to sort of kinda like her. Steph wasn’t sure why this was a big thing, but it was.

“Does he need a hand?” Jason asked.

“Who?” said Steph. “The Brat Wonder?”

Simultaneously, Jason said, “The Brat Wonder.”

They both snorted. Steph said, “Probably, but he won’t admit it.”

Jason stood up. He was super tall for a Robin: Dick and Tim were built short – well, Tim more so than Dick, but still – and compact and lithe. Jason was pretty much built like Bruce, but way less heavy. “He doesn’t need to admit it,” he said. “He just needs to not get eaten.”

He held out a hand to her. Steph took it.

Predictably, because this was, after all, her life, this was the moment when Killer Croc came crashing back into the warehouse: Damian had latched on, somehow, to Croc’s back and shoulders and was making questionable use of a batarang to… well, as far as Steph could see, he seemed to be trying to wedge Croc’s maw open with the thing.

“I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that in a movie sometime,” she said. “Were there dragons? I think there might’ve been dragons.”

“He’ll get his hand bitten off,” said Jason, readying a jumpline.

“Sometimes I wish,” Steph said gloomily.

Jason swung off without another word, dropping gracefully down four stories to crash boots-first into Croc’s chest. There was a great deal of yelling, a bestial roar, a shower of Arabic curses, and _then_ a great deal of teetering on the edge of the hole in the floor that would drop them into the basement. Damian appeared to be undecided as to whether he’d rather go on torturing Croc or stab Jason with the Batarang; Jason kicked Croc in the balls with admirable enthusiasm.

Croc let out a bellow of pain that could’ve shattered glass windows of there had been any left, and over the dying echoes of his roar came Damian’s dulcet tones: _get off Todd this is none of your business!_

“Then take your pathetic personal feuds outta my neighbourhood!” Jason bawled back.

“PATHETIC!” Damian thundered, going redder with anger than he already was with exertion. Croc got his feet back under him and tried to take a swing at Jason, but Damian did something with the Batarang, and Croc’s head wrenched back and up, howling with pain again, and Jason kicked him in the crotch again, and OK, all this yelling was giving Steph a migraine, honest to God.

She thumbed her comm back on.

“Boy Robins,” she said to Proxy. “Always starting shit they can’t finish.” She sighed, but it was an effort to make it sound put-upon and long-suffering and exasperated and all those other negative things she was supposed to be feeling right now instead of unmitigated glee. _Upon landing the Red Hood kicked Killer Croc in the crotch_. Oh, the face Babs would make when she read that. Steph felt like rubbing her hands in delight. “Batgirl to the rescue. _As per usual_.”

Neither of the boys were inclined to see it that way, but was Steph supposed to care about their poor hurt feelings? No siree, she was not.

Besides, Jason volunteered.

(Steph didn’t know it yet, but she was going to spend the next six weeks reminding him of that every time he whinged about the cast. Good times.)

 

 

**(iii – barbara and dick)**

It was gone midnight when Jason reached Babs’ tower, and he was expecting to just dump the intel she’d asked for on her desk or computer table or wherever and take off again, but there was a light on, and voices, and then Dick’s sudden laugh.

He’d moved towards the door before he could talk himself out of it.

“Hey, wow, nice pants,” said Dick, and grinned.

Jason glowered at him. It was the first week he’d been able to take the damn cast off, and he’d discarded sweatpants and climbed back into un-slit-up-the-leg jeans with a sigh of intense relief.

“Is that my intel?” asked Babs, leaning over the back of the couch towards him. The chair was standing on the other end of the couch to Jason; she was tucked comfortably into Dick’s side. Very cosy. Very private. “Thanks, Jay, that’s awesome.”

“Eh,” he said. “No trouble. Here.” He leaned over to pass her the drive. She took it; their fingers touched. Jason always _noticed_ when people touched him. He had a sudden urge to take his gloves off.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Babs, smiling. “Get you a beer?”

“Oh,” said Jason. “No, I –“

“Come on, little wing,” said Dick. “I bet Alfred hasn’t let you _see_ a sixpack since Croc broke your leg.”

Well, that was true, objectively speaking, but while Jason enjoyed a beer every now and then, he wasn’t really a drinker – that was about as likely as him getting curious about heroin – and besides, look at the two of them, movie nights and cuddling and popcorn, even, for crying out loud.

“It’s fine,” said Jason. “Thanks all the same.”

Having Alfred in his apartment twice a day for six weeks had dragged his manners kicking and screaming back into use. It was… annoying. He dropped a hand on the back of the couch and said, “I’ll see you, Babs,” but then he had to turn his head back to the TV when the movie came on, and groaned.

“Oh, no, you’re seriously watching this?”

“It’s Dick’s favourite movie,” said Babs.

“It’s Babs’ favourite movie,” said Dick.

It had, once, been Jason’s favourite movie as well. He had an idea that it was the first one he’d ever seen, but he wasn’t sure if this was actually true or not. Just because they hadn’t had a television by the time his mother had died didn’t mean they’d never had one. It could’ve been pawned off at any point by either of his parents.

But the Goonies… Jason remembered that movie perfectly. It’d been after Dick had come to the Manor and found out about… Robin, and the adoption. It’d been after a yelling match with Bruce the echoes of which had reached even to Jason’s ears in his bedroom two floors away – a fight that had made him feel small and manipulated and used and unwanted, even though he’d had no part in it at all. But two days later Dick had come back, and had brought with him as a peace offering a well-worn video cassette of the Goonies.

 _I’m sorry_ , he’d said. _Pax?_

Jason had had to ask Alfred, later on, what pax meant exactly, but the intent behind the words was clear enough. He’d shrugged and shuffled his feet and said, sure, and Dick had put the movie on and they’d watched it together and Jason had been spellbound and delighted and a little bit awestruck by the pirate ship at the end.

He hadn’t watched it since… before. And now, as it began to play, he found he couldn’t tear his eyes off the screen.

Babs reached out very gently and wrapped her fingers around his wrist. He glanced at her sharply; she tugged at him, mouth crooked into a tiny smile. She wanted him to come round the couch, sit down, watch with them.

Jason needed to leave right now.

Dick said, “You know, this is one of the first movies I ever remember watching? I think my Mom and Dad took me to the theatre a few times when I was a kid, but I don’t remember any of the movies. And when I came to the Manor I’m not sure Bruce had even heard of _Star Wars_. He said he had, but I suspect him of having done research as soon as he realised I enjoyed them.”

It had been Dick who had given Jason videos of _Star Wars_ as well.

Jason sat down.

After a minute, Babs passed him a beer.

Jason balanced it on the arm of the couch and stripped his gloves off. Dick crossed his legs at the knee and said thoughtfully, “You know who Ma Fratelli reminds me of?”

Jason sighed. “Granny Goodness,” he said. “As _ever_.”

“Oh, well,” said Dick. “Some associations, you know.”

“Shut uuuuup,” said Babs. “I’m trying to watch this.”

Dick grinned at the screen. Jason unzipped his leather jacket and left it on the floor with his gloves. The popcorn was still warm, and slathered in butter; by contrast the beer was cold, and his leg was kind of aching a little: it felt good to prop it up on the coffee table and let it rest there.

Babs said, “Ugh, no, take your filthy boots off.”

“Oh, suck it up,” said Jason, but he bent to scrabble at the laces just the same, feeling out the knots with his fingertips, not wanting to look away from the screen.

It wasn’t a very big couch. After a while, the line of warmth on his right that was Babs began to list sideways a little and lean against him. Jason didn’t notice at first, and when he glanced sharply at Dick he found his brother was asleep.

He did look kind of exhausted. Just looking at him made Jason want to yawn. Barbara laid her fingers over his hand, very gently; when she thought Jason was asleep too she squeezed it softly.

“My Robins,” she said, with a sort of break in her voice. God, Jason hated making the people he loved cry.

He couldn’t stand to open his eyes, but he turned his hand around in Babs’ and squeezed back.


End file.
